In a classic rites-of-passage journey in Argentina, Chris Moss takes a big
diesel and a small steam train to Patagonia.

For years I’d been driving past Constitución station, wondering when my time would come to stroll on to the concourse and find my platform for the great journey south. Sur is a beautiful tango, and in Argentina, which is already pretty far south, you just want to keep going down and down, as far as you can.

When an old schoolfriend, Mike, flew over to visit me, we decided it was time to go to Patagonia. We had both been born in the village of Burtonwood, Lancashire, and had grown up half an hour’s walk from the oldest railway track in the world, the Rainhill-Manchester line. For us, the train was the only way south.

Although the past 20 years have seen the Argentinian rail network dwindle and decay, there’s still a service of sorts from Buenos Aires to the ersatz Swiss Alpine resort of San Carlos de Bariloche, 1,060 miles away in the foothills of the Andes – though, even as I write, parts of the line are closed because of dust. The exciting thing for me, though, was that you could get off the train just short of Bariloche, at Ingeniero Jacobacci, to board the steam train Argentines affectionately call La Trochita: the Little Gauge.

We had four weeks free, a sheath of pesos in our pockets, a carton of cigarettes, a bottle of bourbon, two full rucksacks and – yes, I know it’s sounding very Blues Brothers – we were wearing huge smiles. We knew the journey would be epic and memorable even as we were buying our ham-and-cheese sandwiches at Constitución and ensuring we had enough water, beer and loo roll. The first leg was in a six-man compartment, and we had four friendly, intelligent young Argentine men for company.

As the diesel train shuddered out of the drab suburbs, we talked about politics, the Falklands, music, girls and football: the five pillars of Anglo-Argentine macho intercourse. We drank beer, played Truco – the card game all Argentines love – and shed the angst and accelerated pace of the big city.

Out on the pampas, we passed through stations with names I knew only as fortresses or generals from the 19th-century campaigns against the indigenous tribes: Las Flores, Azúl, Laprida.

Sometimes we were no faster than the half-wild horses that cantered alongside the line. Sometimes we stopped altogether for 10 or 15 minutes, and the cows got tired looking up at the long chain of carriages and went back to chewing grass.

It was late afternoon when we stopped at a station close to the Ventana mountains. The range isn’t well known outside Argentina, though it’s popular with hikers and an important geological landmark: where the Andes are 100 million years old, the Sierra de la Ventana sits on a Precambrian base perhaps two billion years old. But the mountains were merely a blip that petered out into a few scraggy hills and soon we were back on the grassy plains.

Approaching the port city of Bahía Blanca, we could see the landscape had changed, and we felt the air getting colder. —andues or, in English, rheas – the larger of the two South American emu-like flightless birds – could be seen alongside the line, and occasionally the perfume of the pampas skunk would drift though the window to mix with the black tobacco being smoked.

From here onwards, we were on the fringes of Patagonia, travelling through three smallish towns – Carmen de Patagones, Viedma and San Antonio Oeste – making a huge curve to point towards the Andes.

Carmen was founded by the Spanish in 1779 as a foothold in Patagonia, then attacked by the Brazilian fleet, aided by British privateers, in 1827. Viedma, too, had a brief moment of near glory. After democracy was restored in 1983, following seven years of oppressive, even murderous, military dictatorship, the incoming president, Raúl Alfonsin, announced that Argentina would create a new capital in the south. Viedma was chosen as the site. The provincianos were euphoric; at last power and wealth would be spread around the nation. Blueprints for a model city were drawn up. As with Carmen, the idea was to colonise and develop the empty hinterland, to fill it with cattle and people, roads and football pitches, taxis and tax officers. But the Buenos Aires-based bureaucrats and politicos weren’t going anywhere, and the plan was shelved.

Patagonia might be doomed as a social and political project, and yet the name retains a mythical potency for travellers.

I’d packed some books and, when not chatting or gawping at the landscape, I flicked through Darwin’s accounts of exploring the coastline hunting for fossils or dipped into Bruce Chatwin’s 1977 travelogue, In Patagonia, in which he unearths, and invents, some wonderful tales about the region.

The book I liked best, though, was William Hudson’s Idle Days in Patagonia. Hudson was raised in Quilmes, just south of Buenos Aires, and in 1870 fulfilled a long-cherished dream of travelling to the Río Negro, the river that marks the northernmost limit of Patagonia. Unfortunately for him – but luckily for us – he accidentally shot himself in the knee and was forced to convalesce for several months. He lay back and observed, and recorded his sometimes rambling, often mystical reflections.

Hudson quotes a memorable passage from The Voyage of the Beagle in which Darwin wonders why he can’t get out of his mind the “arid wastes” of Patagonia and decides it is because their emptiness gives “free scope to the imagination”. But Hudson challenges this theory, arguing that Patagonia is affecting because the absence of noise, movement, animals and plants induces a “state of intense watchfulness” and wakes up the primal and animal in us.

I’m not sure my journey woke up quite the same aspects of my nature. We all got drunk together on the second night as we sensed the diesel train nearing its destination.

Our last supper was a debauched bout of competitive drinking. When the bourbon ran out, the Argentines passed around a bottle of Old Smugglers, an Argentine variation on whisky that smells like peat but tastes like turps. With only a bag of peanuts between six of us, the results were predictable, and the compartment had a prison-cell atmosphere by the time we pulled into Ingeniero Jacobacci.

At the station I saw a flyposter advertising “El Viejo Expreso Patagónico” – the Old Patagonian Express – the name given to the train between Ingeniero Jacobacci and Esquel by Paul Theroux, who rode it at the end of an epic rail journey that began in Boston. I preferred the diminutive “Trochita” – “little gauge”, perhaps, but with enough power to get you across the fearsome Patagonian steppe, come rain or shine, blizzard or tornado.

The Trochita was leaving in three hours – it seemed our arrival was more a coincidence than a connection – so we had plenty of time to look it over. At the front was a Henschel steam engine shipped from Germany in 1922. The pistons and valves were already making quite a noise, but for the moment only small commas of smoke were rising from the great smokestack at the front. As always with old trains – and especially perhaps in underemployed Argentina – there seemed to be far too many people shouting and advising and watching for the surely quite straightforward job of getting some water boiled.

Finally, the driver had mustered enough coal, fire and faith to commit himself and the little engine to embarking on a 250-mile journey across a no-man’s land. With a whistle and a whoosh of steam, we said goodbye to no one at all and were off. Well, I say “off” but, if the diesel train moved at horse speed, we were now on an ailing burro.

We were in basic class. Some seats had cushions, but we had only wooden slats. I spent most of the time sitting at a doorway at the back of the train, with Mike and a few others – our four friends were still with us – just looking backwards along the line. Flocks of the smaller Patagonian rheas called choiques were around us; the train’s whistle would startle them and it wouldn’t be unusual to see one dash off in manic meanders, hopping across the line, one wing opened like a sail to capture the Patagonian wind. I spotted a guanaco, too, high up on a hill. Smaller and less hairy than its cousins, the llamas and alpacas of the north, the guanaco is a beautiful red-haired camelid that has delicate toes adapted to the scrubland.

Northern Patagonia is mainly desert. Not the archetypal desert of sand and dunes, but a barren, stony desert occasionally punctured by thorny bushes and spiky tufts of grass called coirón. Scraggy-looking lambs could be spotted, on the lookout for a juicy-ish bite; there are more sheep than people in Patagonia, but so scarce is the food each animal needs several acres.

The land was less level now. We were close to the foothills of the Andes, and already rocky formations and low bluffs were cracking through the arid crust. The land was brownish, dead-looking. A low sierra rose on the left of the line. Vultures, hawks and maybe condors – I couldn’t make out the Shakespearean ruff they wear – wheeled in gyres above the peaks.

Every few hours, the train stopped in the middle of nowhere and no one got on or off. It was as if the driver were imagining a populated land – just as so many dreamer-colonists had done before in Patagonia. The names of the stations were sometimes not Spanish but Tehuelche, or a mixture of both: Futa Ruin, Manuel Choique, Fitalancao. It was hard to imagine any indigenous peoples prospering in such barren terrain. There are no trees for shade, hardly any rivers for water and only the toughest of materials for building shelter. But I had seen photographs of Tehuelche tribespeople. They looked like the land they ruled over: tough, leather-skinned Indians who carried spears and lassos and dwelt in rudimentary huts made from guanaco skin. They had no horses until the Spaniards arrived. They never seemed to be smiling in the old photographs.

As dusk arrived a wind whipped up. Dust devils raced across the track and the low bushes bent their heads. When it stopped, the Milky Way glowed and the temperature fell to below freezing. That night we didn’t sleep, but sat huddled close on our wooden benches, hugging cups of tea. Each carriage had a samovar. Our four Argentine companions were now proper amigos, so we could sit in silence at ease. They had brought yerba mate, the green tea Argentines drink communally, and we were soon incorporated into their rounds of sipping, refilling and passing along.

In Esquel we were greeted by a frosty orange dawn. We said our goodbyes to the Argentines and Mike and I set off into town. There were Italian coffee shops, Spanish bars, Welsh flags. But we wanted to keep moving. We went for a coffee and decided to… walk to Chile. It sounds mad, but the long trip had left us wanting more of the same.

We hopped on a bus to Lago Puelo, picked up a map from a park warden and set off. Every trip Mike and I have undertaken – from camping in the Lake District in our teens to walking to our local “rec” – has been a rite of passage, but Patagonia, by train and boot, was our biggest yet (I won’t say “ever”).

Patagonia’s bleakness wasn’t quite beautiful but its blankness stirred something inside me. After the trip I read all the way through the Chatwin, the Theroux and the Darwin, and many more Patagonia books besides. I even wrote a book about the region. On that journey, though, we were far too busy telling, and living, our own stories.

Chris Moss is the author of Patagonia: A Cultural History, published by Signal and now available as an ebook.

Essentials

From where to where? South from Buenos Aires through the central and southern pampas in Buenos Aires province, then west across the desert of Río Negro province in northern Patagonia, finally turning south again to ride the Trochita to the town of Esquel.

How far? 1,220 miles.

How long? Three nights on the diesel train; two days and two nights on the steam train.

Buffet or banquet? Neither. Take snacks and, if it’s winter, a Thermos. If you want to bond with locals, take a mate gourd and yerba mate, too.

Sitting comfortably? Not particularly. The fixtures on the Old Patagonian Express are rudimentary. The long-distance trains sometimes have sleeper cars (camarotes) but some services have reclining seats only.

Time to read… Paul Theroux’s Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas (Penguin) is a minor classic or a bad-tempered career-starter, depending on your taste.

Listen to… The soulful folk of the late, great Mercedes Sosa, the “earth-mother” of Argentina and the voice of the interior.

When to go Between November and April – spring or summer in the southern hemisphere.

How much? There is currently no direct service from Buenos Aires to Esquel, but train buffs with time on their hands can still follow many sections of this route. There are three trains a week between Buenos Aires and Bahia Blanca, operated by Ferrobaires (ferrobaires.gba.gov.ar). Single from £8.22; journey time: just under 14 hours.

Dust from a sandstorm in 2010 closed the line south of here, so the easiest thing to do is take a bus to Viedma. There is a line from here to Bariloche that stops at Ingeniero Jacobacci, operated by Tren Patagónico (the website is trenpatagonico-sa.com.ar but currently the Spanish-only site sateliteferroviario.com.ar, maintained by train enthusiasts, is more up to date). Single from £14.88; journey time approximately 17 hours.

The Río Negro provincial government operates a patchy service from Jacobacci to Ojos de Agua (30 miles of track); for details email comercial@sefepa.com.ar.